Ever since the iPhone 15 Pro launched, its new Action button has divided critics. Sure, it’s a neat new tool with tons of potential, but at the same time it feels disappointingly limited. Well, one app has just revealed a genius way to expand the Action button’s functionality in a big way.
Popular photography app Halide ($2.99 / £2.49 / AU$4.49 per month) is best known for giving iPhone photographers a bunch of powerful tools for snapping top-notch shots, and it’s our pick for the best camera app you can get on iOS. Now, its developers have released an update that incorporates a bunch of clever features for the Action button.
According to the developers, the Halide 2.13 update lets you quickly launch a variety of features in the app, including switching between 12MP and 48MP resolutions, cycling through lenses, triggering manual focus, enabling raw image capture, and moving between auto and manual exposure. And yes, it’ll also let you simply take a picture.
To do all this, Halide’s developers built a custom shortcut that is triggered when you press the Action button. This shortcut then launches whichever option you have selected in Halide’s purpose-built Action button menu.
Back in action
This Action button shortcut is not the only update Halide’s developers included in the 2.13 update. There are also optimizations for the 5x zoom on the iPhone 15 Pro Max, new tools that make use of the zero shutter lag in the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, and a slate of other improvements.
It’s just the latest clever enhancement to the Action button. By default, this button can only launch apps and functions with a single press, which has spurred developers on to various ingenious ways to improve its abilities.
For instance, some enterprising users have found a way for the Action button to perform different tasks depending on whether you hold your iPhone in portrait or landscape mode.
It shows the power of the Apple Shortcuts app, as well as the future direction the Action button could move in. If Halide’s latest update is anything to go by, there could be a lot more for photographers (and everyone) to look forward to.
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